


Brighter Once

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Dark, Archangels, Dark Sherlock, Demon Moriarty, Fallen Angels, Gen, dark!Sherlock, permanently incomplete. abandoned fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes has Fallen twice. Jim Moriarty is becoming Something (but he might have been it all along). John Watson is John Watson.</p><p>(ambitious prologue to an AU that will never be revisited sry)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brighter Once

#### Prologue

***

 

Sherlock Holmes has Fallen twice. The first time, he was going by a different name.

 

***

 

_Humans (homo sapiens, if one wanted to get technical; there were those few unfortunately defective prototypes, there in the Beginning) hadn't quite made it onto the scene at this point, and so words like Devil and Satan had yet to appear. Of course, these are only the most plebeian of his many names; those of that first crop of humans who came to know him would whisper about him in the night, and he would be christened His Majesty, the Prince of Darkness, Appointer of False Gods, Lord of Eternal Suffering, the Shining One who is the Morning Star and Son of the Dawn, among other wonderfully descriptive but mostly inaccurate titles. For now, he was Lucifer, an archangel, one of the Most High. And like all of his kind, he was searingly beautiful and serene and Grace-filled. He was also the cleverest of his brothers, and the keenest to the Project that the Father had been so busy with lately; although, he thought, there were a couple points which could really stand to be improved upon._

_Because, lately, Lucifer had been starting to feel as if maybe eternal Grace was a bit dull. And there were inklings in him, hypotheses about life, about existence- concepts just as vast and nebulous as his Father’s own. And though none of these had names yet, there were among them something that would come to be called Free Will, and one along the lines of The Existence of Good is Validated Only by the Possibility of Something Else (which would come to be known as Wickedness). He knew they could work as equals, the Father and he, in the Creation of the newest children, beings that should be marvelously imperfect (because Lucifer started to disdainfully recognize a state of infinite glory as vain without a basis for comparison). Each darling one would be multifaceted and complicated and vividly, richly alive, with entire realms of the things that would come to be named thoughts and emotions and conflicts inside of them, and they would innovate and create, and they would thrive, responding to things that would come to be recognized as challenges in the most entertaining ways._

_Lucifer had brilliant ideas, and his Father would be pleased by them._

_Really, how could He not?_

 

***

 

Carl took medication for eczema. His socially inferior classmate, James, took medication that was prescribed to him for epileptic seizures. This is interesting, because James Moriarty did not have epilepsy. What he did have were lucid, waking visions of fire and blood, of swelled, weeping, pestilence- ridden flesh and the scrabbling of innumerable bony hands against brimstone, of creatures with too many of an extremity and not enough of another and all of its angles bent unnaturally, joints inverted, gristle on the outside with the throbbing, sick-soft tissue, and sudden intervals of muted, despaired, soulless mad screaming that seemed to relate, somehow, to the aberrant beasts, of a pulsating, warm, fetid oblivion, black as soot, which he promptly realized was a writhing cloud of insects. 

The scenes (and there were many more of them; eternities more) didn't frighten him. They never had. He already knew better than to breathe a syllable of it to anyone. It was when he was having an episode that Carl laughed. It was the visions that gave James strength to stop him laughing.

James reads esoteric and hermetic and heretical texts, grimories, Dante and Virgil, John Milton and William Blake, Rushdie, Pullman, and Gaiman before promptly dismissing all of them as imbecilic. He is almost eleven years old. 

When he is twelve, he decides that people are flies, full of chaos, insignificant life and noise, purposelessly flitting about in random patterns before their tiny vermin lives are extinguished like candle-flame. James is better than them. Smarter. Regalia amidst a fog of insects. 

He stops seizing. Reveries are resigned to visiting him in his sleep. James has the loveliest dreams. 

James decides to discard his birth name in favor of its utterly common abbreviation. This serves to make him all the more indistinguishable among the masses of pests, and in anonymity, he thrives.

 

***

 

James has never had a seizure. Jim has never truly dreamed.

He has been remembering. 

 

***

 

When Captain John H. Watson, invalided doctor in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, makes the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes, he has been living up until that point as if he were an ordinary human. The ‘human’ bit is correct.

After that first meeting, he thinks, _This man is something else._

The ‘something else’ is right on point.

 

***

**Author's Note:**

> So. This is my first fic. Uh
> 
> hopefully i won't neglect john so much in the following chapters.
> 
> YEP
> 
> title is taken from verses 131-133 of Book 7 of Paradise Lost: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_7/index.shtml
> 
> EDIT- 3/25/2014-  
> i can't believe i wrote this when i was SIXTEEN OH MY GOD  
> i'm 18 now and have slowly been moving away from the Sherlock fandom. precisely, i've realized that i like all the amazing AMAZING fanfic and art and creative stuff based around the show more than i like the actual show LOOOLLL (moffat. what a pile of garbage)  
> however, that doesn't mean i don't still enjoy the everloving heck out of dark AUs. but i mean yeah this fic had a really ambitious premise and i'm done with sherlock as a fandom so  
> peace.


End file.
